The Law of Entropy: Why You Can’t Actually "Simplify" Your Product
The Executive Summary: Most leadership teams believe simplicity is something you create by removing buttons. It isn’t. Complexity is a physical constant. If you don’t handle it in your System Logic, your Users and Staff will end up paying for it in manual labor and anxiety.
1. The Conservation of Complexity
In physics, the Law of Entropy states that in any closed system, disorder always increases. Software is no different.
Every product has a baseline amount of inherent complexity required to solve a problem. Think of this complexity like a 10lb weight. You can move the weight around, you can hide it under a rug, or you can pick it up yourself—but you cannot make the weight disappear.
In Product Design, we call this the Conservation of Complexity.
When a CEO says, "Make it simpler," what they usually mean is "Hide the mess." But if you hide the mess without fixing the underlying logic, you haven't simplified anything. You’ve just shifted the burden of that mess onto someone else.
2. Where is your Complexity Hiding?
If the complexity isn't being managed by your Architecture, it is being taxed out of your people. There are two primary places this entropy hides:
The User’s Brain (The Cognitive Tax): You "simplified" the UI by removing a status bar. Now, the user doesn't know if their $50,000 transfer worked. Their anxiety spikes. They spend 10 minutes refreshing the page and then 20 minutes on hold with support. You saved a pixel; you lost a customer’s trust.
The Developer’s Calendar (The Operational Tax): You shipped a feature without defining the Error States (the logic). Now, every time a user hits a snag, an engineer has to stop building new features to "investigate the database." Your developers have become Manual APIs—human bridges for broken system logic.
3. The Solution: Integration UX
The goal of a Senior Systems Practitioner is not to delete complexity, but to transfer it to the machine.
We use a framework called Integration UX.
Most design stops at the Interface (how it looks). Integration UX starts at the Handshake (how the data moves). By building Logic Gates and Axiomatic Protocols into the foundation of the product, we force the software to absorb the entropy.
Interface Design: Let’s make this button blue and hide the advanced settings.
Integration UX: Let’s write the logic so the system predicts the user’s next three errors and prevents them from happening in the first place.
4. Moving the Invoice
When you invest in System Logic, you are paying the Complexity Tax upfront. It’s expensive and it takes discipline. But it’s a one-time payment.
When you ignore the logic and focus only on the Fidelity (the screens), you are choosing to pay that tax every single day in the form of support tickets, R&D waste, and team burnout.
The Diagnostic Question for CEOs: Look at your last three product launches. Did they feel "simple" to build, or are you still paying for them in "manual fixes" six months later?
If you are still paying, your entropy is unmanaged.
